Vintage-style anchor design with coiled rope and pink, peach and teal roses and leaves, drawn in fine black linework on a cream background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with rope and vintage roses

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A detailed anchor drawing with hatched shading on the shank and flukes, wrapped in a coiled rope and decorated with roses, blossoms and teal leaves. The linework is dark and fine, with cross-hatching giving the metal form depth. Soft peach, pink and teal colours sit over a cream background that fades to a darker edge, giving a faded, vintage feel.

Traditional Botanical Anchor Rope Rose Flower Leaves

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry to Lindholm stopped running in October, the year the harbour silted, and after that the only way out of Scarrow was the milk train that left the station at dawn and came back at dusk. Edie Marr had worked the ticket hatch for eleven years and knew every face that bought a return. Most of them were coming back from Carlisle with bags of boiled sweets and no news.

Keep reading

One morning a man arrived with no ticket and a canvas roll under his arm. He asked for a single to the sea, which made the porter laugh, because there was no sea past the cutting, only the flats and the grey tidal mud. He unrolled the canvas on the counter anyway. It was an anchor, drawn in ink so fine you could count the hatchings on the shank, and someone had bound a rope around its neck and tucked roses into the crook of the arms, pink and peach and a teal that seemed to glow even in the lamplight.

Edie asked him what it was for. He said his grandmother had drawn it on the back of a seed packet, and that when the anchor was rooted in a place it held the place fast, and when it was lifted the roses came loose and went wherever they liked. He had been carrying it since spring, he said, waiting for the roses to decide.

She gave him the single fare out of her own purse. The train pulled out at dusk with him aboard, and the roll of canvas lay forgotten on the counter. The next morning Edie found a single rose pressed flat between its leaves, still faintly pink, and she tucked it behind the hatch glass where the light could reach it.